First results with a microcavity plasma panel detector

A new type of gaseous micropattern particle detector based on a closed-cell microcavity plasma panel sensor is reported. The first device was fabricated with 1×1×2 mm cells. It has shown very clean signals of 0.6–2.5 V amplitude, fast rise time of approximately 2 ns and FWHM of about 2 ns with very uniform signal shapes across all pixels. From initial measurements with β particles from a radioactive source, a maximum pixel efficiency greater than 95% is calculated, for operation of the detector over a 100 V wide span of high voltages (HV). Over this same HV range, the background rate per pixel was measured to be 3–4 orders of magnitude lower than the rate with which the cell was illuminated by the β source. Pixel-to-pixel count rate uniformity is within 3% and stable within 3% for many days. The time resolution is 2.4 ns, and a very low cell-to-cell crosstalk has been measured between cells separated by 2 mm.